Postscript: Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger, who died yesterday, at ninety-four, lived into his posterity. For years, he occupied a house up a rising dirt road in the woods. The house was on a cliff, overlooking his beloved Hudson River. He had cleared the land, like a pioneer. In the New York Public Library, he had found instructions for building a log cabin. In the decades since, he cut trees for firewood. A teacher at the boarding school he had attended had taught him to split logs. The woods were orderly, having been pruned for so many years.

He believed in the dignity of the individual life, but he wasn’t comfortable with people close at hand. He had no taste for light conversation. He was like the parson of a small parish, constantly engaged with the welfare of his church. Did the farmer whose child had drunk tainted well water and whose wife had died have someone to watch over the child, so that he could tend to his crops? Would it be possible to interest the rich man who came only at Christmas and Easter to pay for the repair of the church roof? Were his sermons sufficiently inspiring? Was his life exemplary? Was he a beacon for his flock?

In fact, his life was exemplary. The courage he showed in facing down the House Un-American Activities Committee, his refusal to give names, and his insistence on his right to entertain his own conscience are not common behaviors. Plenty of people gave names. Plenty of people pleaded the Fifth Amendment, but Seeger refused to, because the plea implied a person had something to hide. He chose jail rather than collaboration. At the time, he was a member of the most successful group in show business, the Weavers. He was not surprised when the government threatened night-club owners if they hired the Weavers, and the group’s opportunities withered. In the year before he was to go to jail, he performed as often as he could, in order to make money for his family to live on while he was gone. An appeal kept him out of prison, but he hadn’t expected it to. He was happy to step away from celebrity and the night-club life, which he never liked, and to return to what he always had done: singing folk songs and union songs for children in classrooms and around campfires. There may be a famous person these days who would choose jail over coöperating with the government against its citizens, but I can’t think of one.

As famous as he was, he was half of a couple. When his wife, Toshi, died, in July, it was just short of their seventieth anniversary. He was reserved up close and sometimes aloof, as if he were entertaining a reverie. He might have disappeared into private life, but Bruce Springsteen revived him. It was on Springsteen’s plane that Seeger flew to Washington to sing at Obama’s first Inauguration. It was a period when the world’s interest returned to him. AfterI wrote my Profile of him for the magazine, I wrote a small book about him. He had wanted a biography that could be read in one sitting, and I tried to do that. The book had been a publisher’s idea, and when I called Seeger to ask if he would take part, I said that a publisher had asked me to expand the Profile. I heard Toshi, in the background, ask what I wanted. Seeger said, “He would like to expand the Profile into a book,” and Toshi said, “Tell him you’ve been expanded enough.”